Succession to the Presidency.—In case the President should die, or resign, or be removed by impeachment, or be otherwise incapable of performing his duties, the Vice President succeeds. In the absence of the Vice President it has been provided by law that the members of the cabinet, beginning with the Secretary of State, have the right of succession according to the seniority of their offices.[[131]] No President has ever resigned or been removed from office. On several occasions, however, a Vice President has succeeded by reason of a President’s death. Some presidents have been seriously ill during their terms of office, and President Wilson was absent in France for several months during 1918-1919; but in no case has the Vice President been called upon to exercise the presidential functions.
The Vice President.
The office of Vice President, apart from the right of succession which it carries, is not of much importance. In selecting their candidates for the office the two leading political parties have usually given very little thought to the problem of getting the most capable man. By the time the great task of nominating a candidate for the presidency has been finished, the delegates are in a mood to get home. They will not spend hours and days taking ballot after ballot for the second place on the ticket. Apart from presiding in the Senate the Vice President has no regular official duties, but there is the ever-present chance that he may have to step into the chief executive position. For that reason the work of selecting candidates ought to be done more carefully than has usually been the case.
The Cabinet
The whole cabinet system rests on usage.
The Cabinet.—The constitution makes no definite provision for a cabinet. Its framers expected that the President would appoint subordinates to assist him in the performance of his numerous functions and they made allusion to these officials; but there was no anticipation that the officials in charge of the various departments would be formed into an organized branch of the government. So the cabinet rests upon usage, not upon the constitution or the laws. The same is true of the cabinet in England. It has no legal status, exercises no formal powers, keeps no records, and has no fixed membership. The prime minister selects, for membership in the cabinet, whomsoever he pleases, the only restrictions being that they shall have seats in parliament and that the cabinet as a whole shall have the support of a majority in the House of Commons. The President of the United States has an even wider range of choice in the selection of his cabinet. He is not bound to choose a group of men who control a majority in either branch of Congress. His cabinet may be as large or as small as he chooses to make it. By usage, however, the American cabinet consists of the heads of the national administrative departments, these departments having been at various times established by law.[[132]] There are now ten such departments and hence ten members of the cabinet. The ten departments are as follows: State, Treasury, War, Navy, Post-Office, Interior, Justice, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor. The head of each is appointed by the President with the confirmation of the Senate; but for more than eighty years this confirmation has never been refused. The heads of departments are responsible to the President alone and may be dismissed by him at any time. They are not permitted to have seats in either the Senate or House of Representatives.
The cabinet’s functions:
The Functions of the Cabinet.—In describing the functions of the cabinet it is advisable to make, at the outset, a distinction between those duties which are performed by the cabinet as a whole, and those which pertain to the members of the cabinet individually, as heads of their own departments.
1. As a body.
The cabinet as a whole has no legal authority.[[133]] It is merely a group of high officials which the President calls together once or twice a week to discuss such matters as he chooses to lay before it, or matters which he permits individual members to bring up. The President may follow its advice or he may not. He does not need the approval of the cabinet for any of his actions. At the same time it has become the custom to consult the cabinet on practically all important questions of general policy and to give considerable weight to the cabinet’s advice. How much this weight will be depends, in large measure, upon the temperament and attitude of the President himself.[[134]]